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[Hey, folks! This was originally posted February 21st, 2013. Looking back on it over the years I’ve come to wish I’d said some things better. Anything in bold and brackets like this is an edit as of January 15th, 2015, almost two years after this post was written. Strikethroughs are also struck through by 2015 me where I no longer agree with what I wrote, but no words have been removed.

Just a preface–this post was never meant to become as big as it did. I’m glad people got something out of it, but I would have thought it out better if I’d known. It was a rant, a very angry rant, that I wrote after running into a lot of ladyhate in my fandoms’ tags and feeling entitled and attacked. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t right too, but I think the context in which this was written matters. It was also meant to be the first of a series of rants, but I ran out of steam. So it’s written in rage and frustration and it doesn’t cover everything. I’ve tried to make it more well-rounded.]

I’ve read a lot of great essays about how fandom is female-majority and creates a female gaze and a safe space for women and etc. But spend five minutes in fandom and you’ll have an unsettling question.

Why does a female-majority, feminist culture hate female characters so much?

It’s not a question of if it happens. You know it does. You can go into any fandom and see it. Some fandoms are worse than others, but it’s always there. Scroll down the Tumblr tag for any show, movie, book, comic, whatever, and you’ll see nothing but love for the men, and a lot of unjustified hate for the women, maybe with a few defenders here and there insisting on their love for the women in the face of all that hate.

To be clear, we’re not talking about female villains. Male villains get just as much hate. It’s fine if you hate Bellatrix Lestrange or Dolores Umbridge, you’re supposed to. (I personally stan for Bella, but I realize that wasn’t the authorial intent.) This is about people hating Hermione, Ginny and Luna, but loving Harry, Ron and Neville. This is about how ambiguous male antiheroes, like Snape, Zuko, or pretty much any male vampire protagonist can get away with walking that fine line between good and evil and not only remain sympathetic, but be even more beloved for how ~tortured~ he is, but when a female character is morally gray that bitch has to die.

So you can’t tell me it’s okay that you hate Sansa because you also hate Joffrey and he’s a dude. They’re not comparable. It isn’t even comparable if you pick a female antihero. Let’s do this apples to apples, here.

We all know that fandom does this. We all know that it’s fucked up and symptomatic of internalized sexism. What’s really fucking weird about it, though, is that the women doing this hating often aren’t ignorant. These are feminists. These are women who can go on meta-analyses of the writing. Some will hide behind pseudo-feminist reasons for their hate—oh, it’s the writing, we just aren’t given strong female characters! (I saw this used for the women of AtLA: Katara, Toph, Azula, et al. This was about when I just backed away slowly because I know a lost cause when I see it.) I’ve seen women who denied being sexist, but couldn’t name a single female character they liked. And it’s always that the female characters aren’t good enough, even when they obviously have a double standard, and they’re measuring women on an impossible scale full of contradictions and no-win binds, while the men are just embraced and loved pretty much for existing.

The reaction nearly every time one of these women is called out is not to say, “Huh, you may have a point, I should examine the way I judge and process women’s actions more closely,” but an insistence of their feminism, followed by a more detailed description of why that particular woman is terrible and she hates her, as if the whole point were not that fandom is already oversaturated with that kind of hate, and as if the person doing the calling out were not already 110% done with that bullshit.

[To put this more bluntly–don’t reblog this post just to explain why some female character is especially deserving of hate, or inbox me with ladyhate. I literally wrote this in frothing rage that I couldn’t escape all the ladyhate and got more delivered to my doorstep to defend the practice of ladyhating. Stop.]

Particularly telling is that male-dominated corners of fandom do not have this problem. They fetishize, they objectify, they ignore. They don’t hate like this.

[I don’t know exactly why I wrote that paragraph. It may have been that I did such a good job avoiding male spaces I actually forgot how bad they are. They’re pretty bad. Maybe it’s that after going to such lengths to find female+queer-gaze spaces I was still knee-deep in misogyny it just hurt more to have it coming from women. But I was wrong to say women hate female characters more virulently than men do.]

We know it happens. What I want to know is WHY.

Theories follow below the cut.

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